The devolution of Dead Space; a warning to the industry that bigger isn't necessarily better

Digitally Downloaded writes: "I really enjoyed the original Dead Space a great deal. The graphics were excellent, the sound design was appropriately creepy, it told an excellent story and gave you a reason to care about what happened to the lead character, Isaac. I am a huge fan of horror games, having thoroughly enjoyed older titles like Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Fatal Frame, despite their somewhat clunky controls. Newer titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent also gave me a few good scares. Some spoilers to the series will follow, so proceed at your own risk..."
(Dead Space, Dead Space 2, Dead Space 3, PS3, Xbox 360)

I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers the Glen Schofield interviews prior to the first Dead Space. The guy was always talking about how scary the game was, how they watched hours upon hours of horror films to hone the gameplay, how they were gonna use sound design and shadows to scare you.

And then Dead Space 3 comes around and all the devs say is "you can craft cool weapons. It has co-op. It adds to the storyline." etc.

I remember those videos; downloading them from the PSN. Those made me admire the development team at the time of Dead Space 1. It was obvious they put a lot of effort and passion into carefully creating an unnerving atmosphere at the time.

Bought and loved Dead Space, got ds2 couldn't finish it, did not even bother with ds3

shame really, they could have made the series great, guess when people are making money they lose all common sense, Publishers and Developers are like politicians in the sense that they are totally out of tune with there public, some would say clueless

I've read FAR more Dead Space 3 hate than love and even more EA hate than love, so I have no clue what you're getting at. Sure some people take EA's side, people ARE allowed to have an opinion, but don't act like DigitallyDownloaded is some sort of superior site for speaking ill of this game like so many others. In fact, I've seen more support for DS 3 from users on N4G than journalists...

Yup, i enjoy the whole trilogy too. DS1 is still the scariest DS. DS2 got more action but imo it still scary because there's no co-op and you alone the whole time. And DS3, well, it's the worst in the series but i like the portion when we can explore the outer space, weapons customization also fun, and co-op isn't bad either (but it get easier if you & your partner have powerful weapons).

If EA greenlight Visceral to make DS4, i hope they back to the root and removed co-op, universal ammo, rolling / covering, and human enemies.

If people could put aside the fact that it's not AS scary as the first game, which the second game is also guilty of being, they'd be able to realize Dead Space 3 is still a damn good game and they'd have a lot of fun with it. Everyone got (justifiably) upset when it seemed as though the game would be cover-based shooting against human enemies with firearms, an idea which I was also heavily opposed to, and that it would feature microtransactions. Then the game was released and it turned out the shooting from cover wasn't something you would need to at all, the human enemies with firearms were only present in 3 levels, and the microtransactions were for resources that were very easy to acquire just by playing the game normally and not spending a penny. Sure the ending was disappointing, but it was nowhere near as horrendous as the conclusion of Mass Effect 3. I thought it was completely unreasonable for anyone to give Dead Space 3 a score of less than 8 out of 10. It was a solid game all the way through. Great visuals, great gameplay, decent story, good campaign length and good replay value. So it wasn't AS scary as the original Dead Space. How could it be to people like ourselves that have played the first two games multiple times and mastered the art of slaying Necromorphs? This wasn't like Resident Evil where all scares were replaced by action sequences and the game devolved into a complete mess, this was still an eerie game that was fun to play from start to finish.

I didn't finish DS3 ether i stopped playing after chapter 6 and sold it back to gamestop, it just didn't feel like a Dead Space game to me in fact it felt more like i was playing a crappy version of Gears of War. Also what was the point of changing suits, they served no purpose at all they were just skins -__-

DS1 is one of my favorite games this gen. DS2 was great too, but it did sacrifice Horror for more action. Which was cool at times, but it didn't need so much of. DS3 was a let down.

Although for the first few chapters, it did feel like DS again. But then you landed on the planet, and that was all over. The weapon crafting was 'neat', but would've fit better in another game. I hope that if there ever was another, they take a serious look back at 1 for inspiration, even a little bit of 2.